July 20, 2005 – Midlife Crisis January 1982

July 20, 2005 – Midlife Crisis January 1982


It’s Tuesday evening January 12, 1982 and I’m en route from LAX to Austin’s Robert Mueller Municipal Airport, International Air Transport Association (IATA) code AUS. I’m three years away from turning 40, a time you begin to ask the tough question: what have you done with your life? Up to now, I have been on a random walk through life, with a long-term goal to apply my degree in economics to some end. I ended up in publishing half-way through my night school effort at the University of Santa Clara to acquire a master’s degree in economics. GL, who owned an ad agency, suggested I apply for an editor’s job for a computer magazine. My random walk suddenly had a direction. That was 1977, when I was 32. Five years later and I’m questioning the wisdom of my choice of path. I say five years because that seems the interval between times for introspection.

The other reason for my self-examination was I had just gotten a promotion and put onto a new publication—I should have be ecstatic but instead I’m asking whether I should be doing something else and why haven’t I gotten further along in life—whatever that means. I’m filled with a sense of impatience as I wing my way through the night into the heart of Texas. If there is one word to describe the years immediately after graduating college it would be impatience—I constantly felt compelled to hurry up. Waiting in line was a waste of time; if I had to wait then I had to have something to occupy myself during the period. The need to constantly have something to do was another compulsion. The purpose of this trip was to do a couple of interviews and to carry out fact-finding PR visits. I was producing more and longer articles than my new magazine could publish. My need to write found vent in providing writing service to PR agencies and individual companies who needed written material generated—brochures, data sheets, speeches, annual reports, etc. And there was the book on hard drives I was planning to write—collecting information during PR visits and at conference where all the drive vendors congregated.

I could not control these impulses and when I was with my wife IM and our two daughters there was an agenda to everything we did. A trip to Monterey included a forced march through the Aquarium—one of the best you’ll find; a visit to Robert Lewis Stevenson’s house, and some other activity that would fill our time with purpose and meaning. An entry in my day timer for Saturday January 30 showed that I cancelled an appointment to donate blood, went for a jog in the morning, completed a freelance assignment and then took everyone to see Chariots of Fire, and afterwards came home and completed a book entitled Bullet Park. Sunday showed I completed a Jerzy Kosinki book—I have a habit of reading several books at once, finished up another freelance assignment begun earlier in the week, and started work on a speech I had to deliver in London on February 16th. IM and the girls would on occasion rebel but they did get caught up in my mania.

This trip was typical of the schedule I felt compelled to keep. I had asked the PR department at the large semiconductor company I’m visiting in Austin to fill my calendar with visits to as many departments in the company that I could see from 8:00AM until I had to leave for the airport at 4:30PM to catch a 6:00PM flight to Dallas IATA code DFW—not Love Field, the older airport just north of downtown Dallas. I gave myself an hour and a half to anticipate the worse case traffic during Austin rush hour—the company I’m visiting is out in the burbs. Recognizing an opportunity to make points within the marketing departments of their company, the PR folks fill my day with a breakfast meeting at the Austin Marriot where I spent the night and a lunch meeting and all the times in between on hour-long intervals. When I left, my notebook was clogged full of information on a variety of semiconductor chips, boards, and systems. About a tenth of the information I amassed would see publication if that—a monthly magazine containing between 80 and 128 pages can only print less than half that number of editorial pages. And there were four editors all contributing copy. This was before the advent of the Internet where one web site can consume far more content than any one person could ever hope to produce.

Wednesday began with a breakfast meeting in Austin and ended with a dinner meeting in Dallas with an attractive PR lady from another large semiconductor company I was scheduled to visit on Thursday. I got into DFW, rented a car, and checked into the Carlton Hotel, a residence hotel that resembled condos rather than a hotel/motel, located across Central Expressway from the large semiconductor company I was to visit. GR, the PR lady, picked me up and drove us to the Mansion on Turtle Creek for dinner. The restaurant is part of a hotel fashioned in 1978 from a Texas cotton baron’s home built in 1925. If you can believe, a 16th-century, Italian Renaissance-style mansion, in the middle of the posh Dallas North Neighborhood, Turtle Creek. We were dining on a corporate expense account, so we discussed the agenda for Thursday—I was interviewing a corporate executive for a profile in the March 1982 issue. Dinner lasted close to two hours and I got back to the Carlton in time to put some of what I had in my notes from earlier in the day in a more understandable form before turning in.

I like coming back to Dallas, especially now that I have the option to come and go as I pleased. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, IM and I were scratching out a living with me working full time and going to school at night. We lived on a strict budget and longed for the day we could move to California. Coming back always reminds me that I’ve moved on in my life. Besides the visiting the large semiconductor company, I also had an appointment to meet with Mostek, one of the earlier semiconductor companies making memory components. It was once an innovative force in the industry, but the following year it would be sold to United Technologies who two years later would sell what was left of it to a Franco-Italian semiconductor company. It was a business case for the rags to riches to rags in the high-tech industry.

My weeklong PR junket would have one more stop in Phoenix where I would meet with another large semiconductor company. I got into PHX, Sky Harbor Airport—IM loves the name—right at 7:00PM collected my rental car and drove to the Doubletree Paradise Valley, at the corner of Jackrabbit and Scottsdale Road. Phoenix reminds me of El Paso—the desert and heat. It’s the big city between LA and El Paso on Interstate 10, which back then was not completed all the way through Phoenix and remained that way for quite a few of the trips we made between San Jose and El Paso for Christmas. The last day of a weeklong trip was spent doing PR visits before getting on my return plane to San Jose at 6:00PM.

After one of these trips I always feel as if I’ve got nothing done for a week and need to get caught up somehow. The feeling only exacerbates the sense of going down the wrong road in life. It passes, however, as I contemplate what other road I would find interesting. The one advantage to working in publishing is that it suits my attention deficit disordered personality. I get bored easily and loose interest in topics as soon as I’ve gotten over its novelty. No other profession in the world lends itself so well to my personality trait. I would stay on the road I’d chosen in 1977 for twenty-three years—so much for midlife crisis changing my life.